Sean Nesselrode Moncada (he/him) is an award-winning historian of art, architecture, and visual culture of the Americas. His research focuses on visual and material modernisms, their uneven implementation across the hemisphere, and their contested social and​ ecological dimensions. He is the author of Refined Material: Petroculture and Modernity in Venezuela (University of California Press, 2023), which examines the material, spatial, and theoretical development of Venezuelan modernisms through the lens of petroleum extraction and refinement. 

He has written on a wide range of subjects pertaining to memory, diaspora, and materiality. Recent publications consider the affective power of earthen material in contemporary art, the deformation of social space under twenty-first-century authoritarian rule, the politics of midcentury informalist abstraction in South America, and the visual legacies of settler colonialism in Latinx art. He is currently at work on the first critical biography of artist, printmaker and archaeologist Maruja Rolando, which is supported by an Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation. 

His writings and reviews have appeared in journals such as Architectural Theory Review; Caiana: Revista de Historia del Arte y Cultura Visual del Centro Argentino de Investigadores de Arte; Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas; Trópico Absoluto: Revista de crítica, pensamiento e ideas; PLATFORM; and Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture. He has received numerous awards including the ALAA–Arvey Foundation Book Award (Association for Latin American Art), the Best Book Award in Visual Culture Studies (Latin American Studies Association), and the Fernando Coronil Prize for Best Book on Venezuela (Venezuelan Studies Section, Association for Latin American Art).

He holds a PhD in Art History and Archaeology from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He is Associate Professor of Theory and History of Art and Design at the Rhode Island School of Design, and he resides in Lënapehòkink, also known as Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

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